Tag Archives: science fiction

The Pod People Film Festival: The Invasion

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The Pod People Film Festival

Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

  1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
  2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
  3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
  4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
  5. The Inva­sion (2007)

The Invasion movie poster

 

Nicole Kid­man must be one of the unluck­i­est stars in Hol­ly­wood, hav­ing recently starred in at least two big-budget cat­a­stro­phes. Frank Oz’ The Step­ford Wives (2004) was sab­o­taged by cast mem­bers drop­ping out, exten­sive reshoots, and com­pet­ing script revi­sions that left sig­nif­i­cant log­i­cal plot holes in the fin­ished film. Sim­i­larly, Inva­sion is best described as quite sim­ply a bro­ken movie. One full year after the com­ple­tion of prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy under direc­tor Oliver Hirsch­biegel (Down­fall), pro­ducer Joel Sil­ver con­tracted Andy and Larry Wachowski (The Matrix, Speed Racer — read The Dork Report review) to write new scenes to be directed by their pro­tégé James McTeigue (V for Vendetta — read The Dork Report review). Warner Bros. expended $10 mil­lion on 17 extra days of shoot­ing in an attempt to reshape what was report­edly a more inter­nal, psy­cho­log­i­cal sus­pense piece into more com­mer­cial thriller.

Nicole Kidman in The InvasionDo you ever get the feel­ing that you’re in a ter­ri­ble movie…?

After a brief, promis­ing open­ing scene (a flash-forward, we later learn, to a world almost fallen to an alien attack), Inva­sion quickly descends into full-on sci-fi action cliché. A space shut­tle dis­in­te­grates on re-entry, car­ry­ing a pay­load of vir­u­lent spores bent on world dom­i­na­tion. After the real-life loss of the crews of the shut­tles Chal­lenger (1986) and Colum­bia (2003), this spec­tac­u­lar spe­cial effects sequence is about as taste­ful as watch­ing CGI sky­scrap­ers crumble.

One of the Wachowski’s late addi­tions was a ridicu­lously long car chase through the streets of Wash­ing­ton DC (filmed in Bal­ti­more), with psy­chi­a­trist Carol (Kid­man) behind the wheel of a lit­er­ally burn­ing Mus­tang. It’s beyond implau­si­ble that a shrink would have the dri­ving skills of a modern-day Bul­let (Steve McQueen) or Pop­eye O’Doyle (Gene Hack­man in The French Con­nec­tion). In fact, Kid­man dam­aged more than her career: she broke sev­eral ribs dur­ing an acci­dent incurred while shoot­ing the sequence.

The biggest prob­lem is not the clum­sily grafted-on action spec­ta­cle but the choppy screen­play. It’s painfully obvi­ous to spot the seams between Dave Kajganich’s orig­i­nal script, which one can infer would have made for a more sub­tle hor­ror story about an alien inva­sion accom­plished with­out bul­lets or the explod­ing of infra­struc­ture, and The Wachowski Broth­ers’ reduc­tion to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor. The movie is at its best when Carol senses the sub­tle changes of her city’s daily rou­tine as the inva­sion spreads. It’s also inter­est­ing as she encoun­ters other unin­fected sur­vivors that have learned to hide in plain sight. Veron­ica Cartwright, who appeared in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 ver­sion, appears as one of Carol’s patients who is appar­ently nat­u­rally immune. She coun­sels her to pre­tend to be a Step­ford Wife in order to avoid detec­tion by the dis­pas­sion­ate alien intel­li­gences that have taken over most of the pop­u­la­tion. But these moody sequences are all too brief in-between the car chases and explosions.

Nicole Kidman in The Invasion“Our world is a bet­ter world”

A huge chunk feels miss­ing from the mid­dle; the sec­ond act should be a slow dis­cov­ery of the details of the inva­sion and a grad­ual esca­la­tion of the con­flict. But Carol and her doc­tor para­mour Ben (Daniel Craig) leap to the accu­rate con­clu­sion of an alien inva­sion based on only a few observed cases of mild weird­ness around them, clear­ing the rest of the movie’s run­ning time for a series of chase sequences. Worst of all is yet another crim­i­nal mis­use of poor Jef­frey Wright (reunited with 007 co-star Daniel Craig), a bril­liant actor sad­dled with most of the script’s laugh­able tech­nob­a­b­ble that leaves no room to the imag­i­na­tion (the orig­i­nal 1956 Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers was arguably not spe­cific enough, but the 1978 ver­sion found just the right level of gory detail with­out get­ting bogged down in tedious pseudoscience).

Jack Finney’s clas­sic sci-fi novel The Body Snatch­ers has been adapted over and over into movies that illu­mi­nate the con­cerns of the times. Don Siegel’s 1956 orig­i­nal was a thinly-veiled cri­tique of McCarthy­ism. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake also made sense in a post-Vietnam and Water­gate era. Abel Fer­rara applied the metaphor to blind obe­di­ence and con­for­mity in the mil­i­tary in his 1993 Body Snatch­ers. Robert Rodríguez found the most per­fect set­ting yet, as he sat­i­rized teen peer pres­sure in high school in The Fac­ulty (1998). What does the oft-told Body Snatch­ers tale mean today? Inva­sion is the fourth ver­sion of novel, and the sec­ond to ditch the notion of replace­ment bod­ies. As in The Fac­ulty: the aliens are puppetmaster-like par­a­sites that take over human bod­ies with­out per­ma­nently harm­ing them. Inva­sion makes a fleet­ing ref­er­ence to other nations pub­licly com­bat­ing the alien insur­gents. The US is the only one to hide behind a cover story that has the oppo­site intended effect, only fur­ther enabling the inva­sion to suc­ceed. Inva­sion might have been a bet­ter film if it had focused more on this glim­mer of polit­i­cal satire than on Shut­tle dis­as­ters and burn­ing Mustangs.

Offi­cial movie site: http://theinvasionmovie.warnerbros.com/

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Pod People Film Festival: The Faculty

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The Pod People Film Festival

Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

  1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
  2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
  3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
  4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
  5. The Inva­sion (2007)

The Faculty movie poster

 

We inter­rupt this ret­ro­spec­tive look at the four offi­cial fea­ture film adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers with a kind of bonus track, a remake in all but name, Robert Rodríguez’s The Faculty.

It may be a touch campy, but hugely enter­tain­ing. All four offi­cial ver­sions are deadly seri­ous, so it’s refresh­ing for The Fac­ulty to play the con­cept for laughs. Rodríguez isn’t known for restraint, but most of the fun is likely attrib­ut­able to Kevin Williamson, the writer of Scream, one of the most influ­en­tial movies of the 1990s. Yes, I’m pre­pared to back that claim up: it was one of the first main­stream movies to be overtly Post­mod­ern, and not in a stuffy col­lege lit­er­a­ture sem­i­nar sense, but one that found low­brow thrills & chills from a high­brow intel­lec­tual per­spec­tive over the hor­ror genre. That is, Scream was both a know­ing satire of the hor­ror movie genre, in which its own char­ac­ters know­ingly com­mented upon the events that befell them with all the knowl­edge that comes from being movie geeks well-versed in hor­ror movie cliches, but was also simul­ta­ne­ously an actual func­tion­ing hor­ror movie itself. Other 1990s movies along those lines were Wild Things (one of the sex­i­est, twisti­est noirs ever made), Star­ship Troop­ers (a hilar­i­ously bleak vision of a fascis­tic world inher­ited by chil­dren), and even Shake­speare in Love’s play­ful plays-within-plays-within-a-movie (read The Dork Report review).

faculty_2.jpgThere’s be no more tears… in gym class

A pro­logue intro­duces us to the name­sake fac­ulty, from which the great (and sexy) Bebe Neuwirth checks out early, or at least seems to. The adult cast is won­der­ful over­all, even though some parts are lit­tle more than cameos. Robert Patrick brings all of his ruth­less Ter­mi­na­tor T-1000 stee­li­ness to Coach Willis (like Dr. David Kib­ner — Leonard Nimoy — in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers, a vil­lain both before and after the inva­sion), the glam­orous Famke Janssen is an improb­a­bly mousy loner, Jon Stew­art as a sym­pa­thetic sci­ence teacher, and Salma Hayek is hilar­i­ous in her brief appear­ance as Nurse Rosa Harper. On the down­side, fat slob Harry Knowles of AintItCoolNews.com noto­ri­ety also haunts the fac­ulty room (this was 1998, after all).

We finally meet the kids in a mon­tage set to a cover ver­sion of Pink Floyd’s infa­mous anti­au­thor­i­tar­ian anthem Another Brick in the Wall Part II, with onscreen text resem­bling Ger­ald Scarfe’s scrawled let­ter­ing on the orig­i­nal The Wall album sleeve. They’re a next-generation Break­fast Club com­prised of every key high school demo­graphic: goth loner Stokely (Clea DuVall), hot ice queen Delilah (Jor­dana Brew­ster), meat­head ath­lete Stan (Shawn Hatosy), bad boy Zeke (Josh Hart­nett), meek nerd Casey (Eli­jah Wood), and sweetness-and-light South­ern belle Mary­beth (Laura Harris).

faculty_1.jpgThis meet­ing of The Break­fast Club II is called to order

Zeke is a slacker genius with an awful hair­cut that hasn’t dated well. He has delib­er­ately failed out in order to relive the glory of his senior year within the safe bub­ble of being Big Man on Cam­pus. He ped­dles a pow­dered nar­cotic (actu­ally mostly caf­feine), dri­ves a fast car, and makes the girls swoon. But under­neath it all is an intel­lect miss­ing an aim or pur­pose. Good for him, then, that an alien inva­sion gives him the oppor­tu­nity to step up.

Trou­bled goth girl Stokely dis­guises her­self as a les­bian to avoid human con­tact. One won­ders why, then, she’s not has­sled by the school’s other les­bians. Like cud­dly mis­fit Alli­son (Ally Sheedy) in The Break­fast Club (1985), Stokely even­tu­ally con­forms to straight-girl norms by dress­ing in pink and dat­ing the jock. DuVall is said to be gay or bisex­ual, so I won­der how she felt about play­ing such a cop-out char­ac­ter. But this oddly con­ser­v­a­tive moment aside, the char­ac­ter is the key to the Post­mod­ern, metafic­tional nature of the movie. Stokely is a sci­ence fic­tion fan that explic­itly ref­er­ences Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers (but not any of the movies). In fact, she dis­par­ages the book, claim­ing it’s a poor ripoff of Robert A. Heinlein’s The Pup­pet Masters.

All Body Snatcher movies to date fea­tured sen­tient brus­sels sprouts that cre­ate evil dupli­cates of humans, destroyed the orig­i­nals, all with the aim of bring­ing a form of peace and har­mony: a uni­form soci­ety in lock­step syn­chronic­ity. But these pod aliens are more overtly evil. These aquatic par­a­sites that tem­porar­ily take over bod­ies are no emo­tion­less drones, but are actu­ally remark­ably lusty. They clearly rel­ish the sub­li­ma­tion of the stu­dents, and stage a foot­ball game like a Nazi Party rally.

All of which begs the ques­tion, if the aliens are like unleashed, unin­hib­ited ver­sions of our own ids, what’s the dif­fer­ence between them and, say, a high school kid hopped up on hor­mones? As one of them aptly puts it, “I’m not an alien, I’m just discontent.”

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Pod People Film Festival: Body Snatchers (1993)

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The Pod People Film Festival

Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

  1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
  2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
  3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
  4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
  5. The Inva­sion (2007)

Body Snatchers movie poster

 

Yet another remake of Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers might seem an odd project for icon­o­clast direc­tor Abel Fer­rara, known for gritty urban crime sagas cen­tered around pro­foundly com­pro­mised pro­tag­o­nists. In stark con­trast, the lead in Ferrara’s most con­ven­tional movie is a good-natured teenage girl, a world apart from the crazed Har­vey Kei­tel of Bad Lieu­tenant or Christo­pher Walken of King of New York. Marti’s (Gabrielle Anwar) biggest prob­lems are a nomadic lifestyle, a moody lit­tle brother, and a new stepmother.

This ver­sion of the bodys­natch­ers story sheds “Inva­sion” from the title, which is strange con­sid­er­ing it ought to be the key word for a movie focused on the U.S. mil­i­tary, at home not long after the first Gulf War (a con­flict thought to be resolved at the time). With Amer­ica at peace and a Demo­c­rat in office, Body Snatch­ers was prob­a­bly one of the first main­stream fea­ture films to directly men­tion the con­flict, along with Courage Under Fire (1996) — David O. Russell’s ruth­less satire Three Kings being still some ways off. Abbre­vi­at­ing the title was a missed oppor­tu­nity to play with the ambi­gu­ity between a mil­i­tary con­firmed as pro­fes­sional, government-sanctioned invaders, and an extrater­res­trial force that eas­ily infil­trates them. But don’t worry, the word “Inva­sion” would be picked up again for Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2007 abom­i­na­tion star­ring Nicole Kidman.

Gabrielle Anwar in Body SnatchersGabrielle, sweetie, you should know bet­ter than to take a bath dur­ing a hor­ror movie…

On home soil, an Alabama army base under the com­mand of Gen­eral Platt (who else but R. Lee Ermey?) must suf­fer the indig­nity of bend­ing over for The Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency as it inves­ti­gates the army’s stor­age of chem­i­cal weapons. The sym­pa­thetic Major Collins (For­est Whitaker) reports increas­ing cases of men­tal ill­ness in his infir­mary (para­noia, fear of sleep, etc.). He sus­pects the toxic chem­i­cals, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to miss the allu­sion to the con­tro­ver­sial Gulf War Syndrome.

Marti falls in love with heli­copter pilot Tim (Billy Wirth), so bland and flat that it’s hard to tell if he’s a pod per­son (to be char­i­ta­ble, maybe this was a delib­er­ate cast­ing call, meant to keep the audi­ence guess­ing). She is befriended by Platt’s punk daugh­ter Jenn (Chris­tine Elise), a refresh­ing dose of non­con­formism among the rank and file — indeed her rebel­lious­ness serves as a canary in the coal mine to mea­sure the progress of the inva­sion. We gen­uinely feel for Marti’s lit­tle brother Andy (Reilly Mur­phy, a rare child actor that does not annoy) as he senses his school play­mates are “bad” and wit­nesses his step­mother (Meg Tilly) die first­hand. Inci­den­tally, Tilly’s per­for­mance as the pod-stepmother is excel­lently weird.

Meg Tilly in Body Snatchers“Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere… ’cause there’s no one like you left.”

Like Philip Kaufman’s 1978 ver­sion of the same mate­r­ial, Fer­rara indulges in the gore and female nudity de rigueur to the hor­ror genre. Marti dis­robes for a very close encounter with grop­ing alien ten­drils in a bath­tub, and later runs through an infir­mary full of gross, half-formed pod peo­ple. The very pretty Anwar is so con­vinc­ingly young-looking that her unex­pected nude scenes make one feel decid­edly uncomfortable.

In all three ver­sions of the story so far, a pod per­son deliv­ers some vari­a­tion of the fol­low­ing warn­ing to human resis­tors: there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and there’s no one else left like you. So why do the pod peo­ple always work so hard to chase down the few remain­ing humans? On the evi­dence of Body Snatch­ers, they’re still very eas­ily defeated, and the cli­mac­tic end­ing is some­thing of a dud.

The infected army base plots to dis­trib­utes pods to other bases, and even­tu­ally amass an armed force capa­ble to tak­ing over the world. But Marti and Tim man­age to blow up the base and as entire con­voy with just one heli­copter. Why was it fully armed dur­ing peace­time, any­way? The first film ended with humans just begin­ning to mobi­lize against the invaders. The sec­ond ended with human­ity totally over­swept. Now the third ends with us win­ning. How will Nicole Kid­man fare in Inva­sion? Tune in after our next review, an inter­lude to look at Robert Rodríguez’ enjoy­able homage The Fac­ulty, to find out…

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Pod People Film Festival: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

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The Pod People Film Festival

Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

  1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
  2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
  3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
  4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
  5. The Inva­sion (2007)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 movie poster

 

Philip Kaufman’s re-imagining of Don Siegel’s 1956 clas­sic para­noid night­mare Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers imme­di­ately sig­nals its unique­ness with a strange and beau­ti­fully abstract open­ing sequence. Psy­che­delic spores float off the sur­face of an alien planet, tra­verse through outer space, and fall to Earth as gelati­nous rain. A glimpse of a news­pa­per head­line describes a simul­ta­ne­ous epi­demic of “spi­der web­bing,” an omi­nous por­tent of what turns out to be the des­ic­cated remains of the invaders’ victims.

Matthew Ben­nell (Don­ald Suther­land) is a piti­less health inspec­tor pin­ing after his excitable col­league Eliz­a­beth Driscoll (Brooke Adams). When her slob den­tist boyfriend sud­denly starts wear­ing suits and loses inter­est in tele­vised sports, she becomes con­vinced a lit­tle too quickly that he’s an impos­tor, and leaps from there to even grander notions of an alien con­spir­acy. But, being a lab worker at the Depart­ment of Health, and the type that keeps a green­house in her bed­room, per­haps she is after all emi­nently qual­i­fied to iden­tify malev­o­lent walk­ing and talk­ing plants bent on world domination.

Leonard Nimoy in Invasion of the Body SnatchersLeonard Nimoy would like to encour­age you to stop sleep­ing around. There will be no more tears.

The orig­i­nal film imag­ined a sub­ver­sive alien inva­sion of sub­ur­bia. In con­ser­v­a­tive small-town Amer­ica, or at least the fan­tasy thereof seen in movies, every­body knows every­body else’s busi­ness. This remake takes place in the lib­eral urban set­ting of San Fran­cisco, where rela­tion­ship net­works are frac­tured into neigh­bor­hoods, socioe­co­nomic classes, and cliques. As our cur­rent fears of avian and swine flus attest, infec­tions spread faster where humans con­gre­gate in tight spaces: schools, slums, pub­lic trans­porta­tion, etc. The aliens in the orig­i­nal plot­ted a slow takeover of American’s already homoge­nous heart­land, while their cousins here tar­get our pop­u­la­tion cen­ters for max­i­mum shock and awe. Still, some secrecy is required at first, and the crea­tures prove them­selves adept at subterfuge.

The great­est deceiver is self-help pop shrink Dr. David Kib­ner (Leonard Nimoy). It’s a cry­ing shame we haven’t got­ten to see Nimoy play more roles like this in his career — by which I mean any­thing other than Spock. Far from a San Fran free-love lib­eral, Dr. Kib­ner is actu­ally a con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tionary, decry­ing the ease with which mod­ern cou­ples mate and part. He believes mod­ern soci­ety as a whole is suf­fer­ing from a fear of respon­si­bil­ity and com­mit­ment. Sadly, out of every­one we meet, he was arguably already a pod per­son all along (we never find out for sure when he his body was snatched). The most inter­est­ing facet of the film for me is the irrel­e­vance of whether Kib­ner was a type of alien advance guard writ­ing books espous­ing pod phi­los­o­phy. I believe the point is that he rep­re­sents a human view­point already sym­pa­thetic to the invad­ing veg­gies: one that longs for a return to con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues and like behav­ior. But why is Kib­ner wear­ing an archery guard on one hand? That’s just a weird affectation.

Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body SnatchersOMG! Look out for the trolley!

Easter eggs include cameos by Don Siegel as a sin­is­ter taxi dri­ver and the original’s star Kevin McCarthy repris­ing his crazed rant “They’re here already! You’re next!” A young Jeff Gold­blum brings all his quirk to bear as neu­rotic poet Jack Bel­licec. His wife Nancy is played by Veron­ica Cartwright, repris­ing essen­tially the same shrieky, pan­icky per­for­mance she deliv­ered in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien.

The orig­i­nal film was a a thinly veiled metaphor for the McCarthy­ism of the period. In the late 1970s, the same story works just as well at the tail end of a dying sex­ual and cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion that began in the 1960s. After the dis­il­lu­sion­ment of Viet­nam and Water­gate, peo­ple may have sensed the com­ing con­ser­vatism and con­for­mity (in other words, Tom Wolfe’s mas­ters of the uni­verse and bon­fires of the van­i­ties) of the 1980s.

This Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers is largely a psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror film, but fea­tures at least one true gross-out sequence in which the alien growth process is explic­itly depicted. Matthew aborts his own bud­ding dupli­cate with a gar­den hoe (a wholly appro­pri­ate weapon for sen­tient veg­eta­bles). The orig­i­nal film avoided detail­ing the process, pos­si­bly to elude ques­tions that couldn’t be addressed with­out vio­lat­ing stan­dards of decency (What hap­pens to the orig­i­nal bod­ies? Why aren’t new­born pod peo­ple naked? Now we know — hey, look! Brooke Adams’ breasts!). Gore aside, the one truly unset­tling image is a glimpse of a body snatch­ing gone awry: a dog with a human face, an acci­den­tal hybrid being cre­ated when Matthew inter­rupts the process of an alien tak­ing over a hobo with a pet doggie.

But what Kaufman’s ver­sion is chiefly known for is its bleak, bleak end­ing, in total con­trast with the faint hint of hope that closes the orig­i­nal. The baton wouldn’t be picked up again for another 15 years, when Abel Fer­rara trans­posed the action to the obe­di­ent, con­formist, oppres­sive world of the mil­i­tary in the tersely titled Body Snatchers.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Pod People Film Festival: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

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The Pod People Film Festival

Wel­come to The Pod Peo­ple Film Fes­ti­val, The Dork Report’s third mini movie ret­ro­spec­tive. After catch­ing up with Rid­ley Scott and George A. Romero, we now take a look at four adap­ta­tions of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatch­ers, plus one unof­fi­cial homage / satire.

  1. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1956)
  2. Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (1978)
  3. Body Snatch­ers (1993)
  4. The Fac­ulty (1998)
  5. The Inva­sion (2007)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956 movie poster

 

For a pulpy 1950s hor­ror flick relat­ing the strange tale of an inva­sion of giant brus­sels sprouts, Don Siegel’s Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers is a star­tlingly gory, para­noid night­mare pos­i­tively loaded with polit­i­cal sub­text. Its themes of iden­tity, mis­trust, and sub­ver­sion have remained rel­e­vant and influ­en­tial for decades, inspir­ing three offi­cial remakes and even left-field homages like Robert Rodríguez’ high school melo­drama The Fac­ulty. Not only has “pod peo­ple” entered the lex­i­con, its screen­play is highly quotable (“They’re here already! You’re next!”) and some­times even rather poetic: “There’ll be no more tears.”

The movie can be a bit frus­trat­ing to mod­ern sci­ence fic­tion afi­ciona­dos used to high pseudo-scientific detail. The aliens’ life cycle seems illog­i­cal and not fully thought-through, to the extent that it harms the plot. It seems a vic­tim sim­ply must be in prox­im­ity to an alien pod for it to begin to grow into your shape. We also learn that a pod absorbs its host’s mem­o­ries when it sleeps, but we see Becky Driscoll (Dana Wyn­ter) dupli­cated after falling asleep alone in a cave devoid of any vis­i­ble pods. What hap­pens to the orig­i­nal bod­ies? How do the pod-born dupli­cates wind up wear­ing the host’s clothes? Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake is more clear on the process, with the added ben­e­fit of allow­ing for more explicit gore and female nudity to tart things up a bit. The 2007 remake Inva­sion solves these prob­lems by side­step­ping the issue entirely, fea­tur­ing a breed of aliens that lit­er­ally invade your body — a mild con­di­tion which is, it turns out, cur­able. Ask your doc­tor, or bet­ter yet, date one!

Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in Invasion of the Body SnatchersEat your brus­sels sprouts! Or you’re next!

As Matthew Dessem points out in his analy­sis of The Blob for the Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion, cer­tain 1950s hor­ror and sci-fi movies beg to be inter­preted as metaphors for key atomic age issues: Godzilla, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Blob among them. But these mon­sters look just like us. So let’s give it a shot. Inter­pre­ta­tion one: the movie man­i­fests a gen­er­al­ized fear of a homog­e­nized Amer­i­can cul­ture. A pod per­son is dis­cov­ered in an inter­me­di­ary state, totally devoid of indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics like a man­nequin. Per­haps America’s fabled melt­ing pot, brought to an absurd con­clu­sion, could result in a dead-end mono­cul­ture of of uni­form reli­gion, pol­i­tics, and behav­ior. Inter­pre­ta­tion two: the story is a thinly veiled metaphor for McCarthy­ism, the con­tem­po­rary Red Scare that envis­aged insid­i­ous Com­mu­nist sleeper cells already among us, threat­en­ing to undo Amer­i­can churches, fam­i­lies, pri­vate wealth, and gov­ern­ment. In either inter­pre­ta­tion, the invaders are con­vinced their sys­tems of belief are cor­rect, and hon­estly believe they are help­ing us by absorb­ing us into their ranks.

Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in Invasion of the Body SnatchersPod per­son in the cor­ner pocket.

The premise may be deli­ciously cyn­i­cal, but the movie does end on a pos­si­ble note of hope. Our hero Dr. Miles Ben­nell (Kevin McCarthy) man­ages to reach some unin­fected human author­ity fig­ures, and cor­rob­o­rat­ing evi­dence helps him con­vince them to mobi­lize against the threat. But does this call to action come too late? From the per­spec­tive of 2009, Amer­ica looks increas­ingly polar­ized and par­ti­san. If the pod peo­ple are already here, which side are they on? As Sarah Palin might say, the Real Amer­ica? I’m sure they only want to help.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

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Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie poster

 

After writ­ing and direct­ing three pre­quels between 1999–2005, it’s easy to for­get that Star Wars god­fa­ther George Lucas opted out of direct­ing Episodes IV: The Empire Strikes Back and V: Return of the Jedi back in the 1980s. Now Lucas appears once again to be ced­ing con­trol over his most famous baby. He’s back to shep­herd­ing along splin­ter projects like The Clone Wars from the more aloof role of Exec­u­tive Producer.

For any­one else con­fused, as I cer­tainly was, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a feature-film sequel to the 2003–2005 Car­toon Net­work tele­vi­sion series “Star Wars: Clone Wars,” in turn fol­lowed by a sec­ond series with the same name as the movie. Got that? There are much big­ger dif­fer­ences than swap­ping a colon for a defin­i­tive arti­cle, start­ing with the visual look itself. The best thing about the orig­i­nal series was its bold, strik­ing visual style, real­ized in a hand-drawn line-art look sim­i­lar to Gen­ndy Tartakovsky’s pre­vi­ous show Samu­rai Jack. From what lit­tle I under­stand of the process, CGI ani­ma­tion cre­ated in 3D can still be ren­dered in a flat 2D style, giv­ing it the look of tra­di­tional hand-drawn cell ani­ma­tion. So the char­ac­ters in the orig­i­nal at least appeared hand-drawn even though they prob­a­bly weren’t.

Ashley Eckstein and Matt Lanter in Star Wars: The Clone WarsAnakin trains a young propellerhead

How­ever, the fea­ture film sequel looks like direc­tor Dave Filoni opted to skip that step and ren­der the char­ac­ters with full 3D shad­ing. The result resem­bles a rough ani­matic or a throw­away videogame cut scene. Filoni gets kudos for not aim­ing for pho­to­re­al­ism, which becomes very creepy when approach­ing the uncanny val­ley — the point where ani­mated char­ac­ters look almost, but not quite, like real humans. Look with fear upon the night­mar­ish zom­bie hor­ror­shows Final Fan­tasy: The Spir­its Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf (the lat­ter being a huge step for­ward, but still not quite there yet). But The Clone Wars’ par­tic­u­lar brand of styl­iza­tion just seems cheap to me; I would have pre­ferred the cool-looking 2D char­ac­ters as they appeared in the TV series.

The Clone Wars is canon within the Star Wars uni­verse, but no one (prob­a­bly not even Lucas him­self) would ever con­sider it as pri­mary as its six older sib­lings. One advan­tage to being rel­e­gated to the sec­ond tier is a free­dom to vio­late ven­er­a­ble Star Wars tra­di­tions. The clas­sic open­ing crawl is gone, replaced with a Cit­i­zen Kane-style news­reel catch­ing the audi­ence up with the key facts needed to make sense of what’s going on in between all the ‘splo­sions. That par­tic­u­lar change is a shame, but brace your­self for some heresy when I admit I find another change rather wel­come: Kevin Kiner’s very non-John Williams-esque score. As much as Williams’ music was the sound­track of my child­hood (my entire gen­er­a­tion can sing the Star Wars, Jaws, and Indi­ana Jones themes a cap­pella, on cue), I had long since tired of him. The point at which I lost it was the wall-to-wall blan­ket of redun­dant music that threat­ened to drown out the already almost over­whelm­ing Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan.

The Clone Wars series and movie are both set chrono­log­i­cally between the events of Episodes II: Attack of the Clones and III: Revenge of the Sith, a razor-thin slice of time in which noth­ing of import really hap­pened in Star Wars con­ti­nu­ity. The movies already showed us how the war began and ended, so The Clone Wars movie and series are basi­cally war sto­ries. This is actu­ally a good thing in light of how the pre­quel tril­ogy often became bogged down in tedious polit­i­cal pro­ce­dure involv­ing inter­plan­e­tary trade routes. The series was by its nature a string of vignettes, but the fea­ture film still feels like an episodic tour through a num­ber of spec­tac­u­lar bat­tles. A par­tic­u­larly grip­ping and excit­ing bat­tle takes place on a ver­ti­cal cliff face, “shot” with a hand-held “cam­era.” Lucas was sure to con­ceive of his two armies as droids and masked clones, allow­ing for car­nage and huge body counts with­out a drop of blood (not to men­tion the eco­nom­i­cal reuse of cos­tumes, and now, dig­i­tal mod­els). I remain puz­zled, how­ever, how clones and droids can have names, ranks, and vary­ing skill sets. This Dork Reporter grew up with the orig­i­nal tril­ogy, and still has trou­ble accept­ing stormtroop­ers being on the side of the good guys.

Tom Kane in Star Wars: The Clone WarsYoda’s look­ing more “kit­ten” than “tur­tle” today

The TV series focused mostly on the bat­tles, but the movie squeezes a frag­ment of a plot in between the action set pieces. Anakin Sky­walker is incon­ve­niently charged with train­ing Ahsoka Tano (Ash­ley Eck­stein), an annoy­ing teen “padawan learner” (a Luca­sism for “appren­tice” that still sounds very much like a George W. Bush mala­prop­ism). I still find it dif­fi­cult to accept that the Anakin we see here and in Episode III is so close to the tip­ping point to absolute cor­rup­tion that he will soon betray the Rebels and become the embod­i­ment of evil, Darth Vader. At this point, he still seems a merely moody and impetu­ous kid horny for the girl­friend he left behind on Naboo. Being respon­si­ble for the spunky, good­hearted Ahsoka cer­tainly does lit­tle to help him attain the state of emo­tional detach­ment Lucas equates with goodness.

Even though there’s no doubt a great deal of very expen­sive tech­nol­ogy behind this kind of ani­ma­tion, it’s still cheaper than mount­ing a live-action pro­duc­tion. Ani­ma­tion, where any­thing is pos­si­ble, is also the best way for the Star Wars fran­chise to expand the sto­ries of its exist­ing char­ac­ters, when the orig­i­nal actors have aged, become too expen­sive, dis­in­ter­ested, or passed away. So why focus only on the pre­quel char­ac­ters? Why not tell more tales star­ring the trin­ity that every­body really loves: Luke, Leia, and Han? Is Lucas afraid that mess­ing with the canon­i­cal heroes gen­er­a­tions of fans have taken to heart is to risk fatally wound­ing their deep emo­tional con­nec­tion to the mythos? Or to be cyn­i­cal, he may always uti­lize the var­i­ous masked char­ac­ters (Chew­bacca, Boba Fett, Jabba the Hut, Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2) in any­thing at any time with­out clear­ing actors’ like­nesses. That said, some of the orig­i­nal cast do lend their voices to The Clone Wars, includ­ing Samuel L. Jack­son, Anthony Daniels, and Christo­pher Lee. James Arnold Tay­lor does an excel­lent impres­sion of Ewan McGregor’s excel­lent (in turn) impres­sion of Alec Guinness.

One last thing: it wouldn’t be Star Wars with­out at least one offen­sively char­ac­ter­ized alien. Jabba’s uncle Ziro the Hutt (Corey Bur­ton) is inex­plic­a­bly voiced as an old South­ern queen.

Offi­cial movie site: www.starwars.com/theclonewars

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

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The Day the Earth Stood Still 2008 movie poster

 

If the least one expects of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that it merely ful­fill the promise of its title, then please move right along, for the earth stands still only a few moments. It is, how­ever, a far big­ger pro­duc­tion than the 1951 orig­i­nal directed by Robert Wise (read The Dork Report review), even account­ing for the infla­tion of film­mak­ing tech­nol­ogy and audi­ence expec­ta­tion for spec­ta­cle. As if to over­com­pen­sate for the original’s now admit­tedly amus­ing implau­si­bil­i­ties and the silly giant robot and fly­ing saucer, it tries too hard to impress with too many uncon­nected ideas and exces­sive hus­tle and bus­tle. It’s even rather inap­pro­pri­ately macho, with more uncon­vinc­ing dig­i­tal heli­copters and mil­i­tary hard­ware than a typ­i­cal Michael Bay movie. At least it’s much, much bet­ter than the dis­as­trous Inva­sion (the third offi­cial remake of The Inva­sion of the Bodysnatchers).

It does get off to a good start with a pro­logue in which a lone moun­tain climber (Keanu Reeves) dis­cov­ers a glow­ing orb in 1928 India. The sequence is mys­te­ri­ous and inter­est­ing, but ulti­mately unim­por­tant to the plot. We later learn that the orb was an alien probe that copied the climber’s DNA, from which to grow a sur­ro­gate body for the alien Klaatu (Reeves again) decades later. Even the most basic plau­si­bil­ity is vio­lated as humans dis­sect his alien body with­out bio­suits or any kind of quar­an­tine at all. One won­ders if ear­lier drafts of the screen­play involved Klaatu’s cap­tors ini­tially misiden­ti­fy­ing him as a miss­ing per­son from 1928. A missed oppor­tu­nity would be a scene in which the aged orig­i­nal adven­turer comes face-to-face with an alien mim­ic­k­ing his youth­ful self. But as it stands, this whole sub­plot acts as a dis­trac­tion. The orig­i­nal movie sim­ply pre­sented the alien as humanoid (if a lit­tle unusu­ally tall and angu­lar) and that was enough. The notion of a alien being reborn in a new body is inter­est­ing but an unnec­es­sary com­pli­ca­tion, one that only raises ques­tions unre­lated to the cen­tral themes. Klaatu is lucky his tem­plate was the hand­some Reeves (at one point, he steals a schlumpy guy’s suit and it fits as if it were tai­lored for him). Sup­pos­edly this body is human, but he exerts super­pow­ers includ­ing the trans­mu­ta­tion of elec­tric­ity into some kind of sketchily-described life force. In this respect, the orig­i­nal is bet­ter; Klaatu out­wardly looks like us, period, end of story. Isn’t that enough? Another extra­ne­ous idea, super­flu­ous to the core story: Klaatu’s giant omnipo­tent robot com­pan­ion Gort is now com­prised of a swarm of nanobots. Why have both a giant robot and itsy-bitsy nanobots? Pick one idea and run with it.

Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood StillKeanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still

But we’re get­ting ahead of our­selves; first we must ful­fill another genre cliché. The Day the Earth Stood Still lines up after the likes of The Hap­pen­ing, The Day After Tomor­row, A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Deep Impact, Watch­men, and Clover­field (the list goes on, and on…) to take another stab at dec­i­mat­ing poor New York City. When human­ity detects an uniden­ti­fied object set to strike Man­hat­tan, Dr. Michael Grainer (Man Men’s Jon Hamm) assem­bles a crack team of diverse experts includ­ing astro­bi­ol­o­gist Helen Ben­son (Jen­nifer Con­nelly) to fly around in black heli­copters and gawp help­lessly at all the spe­cial effects. Luck­ily, for the moment at least, the object turns about to be a space­craft. In 1951, alien emis­sary Klaatu (Michael Ren­nie) went to Wash­ing­ton like Mr. Smith. In 2008, this Klaatu fig­ures the place to make a grand entrance is Manhattan’s Cen­tral Park (never mind that the United Nations head­quar­ters is on the East Side). Fans of computer-generated destruc­tion of the sort in which Roland Emmerich traf­fics will be pleased to see Cen­tral Park forcibly land­scaped before the movie is over. Dur­ing the final cli­max in the Park, I’m pretty sure the prin­ci­pals hide under the exact same bridge as the sur­vivors at the end of Cloverfield.

Like the orig­i­nal, it’s cred­ited as being based on the 1940 short story “Farewell to the Mas­ter” by Harry Bates. Its cin­e­matic touch­stones include The Brother From Another Planet and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But it shares a crit­i­cally flawed plot ele­ment with the more recent Watch­men (read The Dork Report review). In the lat­ter, mor­tal hero­ine Silk Spec­tre must con­vince Dr. Man­hat­tan, an ambiva­lent non­hu­man that couldn’t care less, to save the world. Klaatu arrives on Earth to receive the report of an ear­lier agent, who con­firms humans are self destruc­tive by nature. That’s enough for Klaatu to begin to purge the planet, but the agent goes on and tries to impress upon him human’s com­plex­ity. Klaatu is unswayed. Helen and her son Jacob (Jaden Smith, son of Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith) try to do the same and suc­ceed just as Silk Spec­tre did, but in both cases the audi­ence can’t quite under­stand how their argu­ments go through to supe­rior beings one step away from god­hood. Because she’s pretty, and her kid whines so much that Klaatu caved in just to shut him the hell up? Per­son­ally, if I was an alien judg­ing human­ity, and I met such an insanely annoy­ing kid, I would purge the planet too. The movie would merit at least one more Dork Report star if the kid hadn’t been in it.

Jennifer Connelly in The Day the Earth Stood StillJen­nifer Con­nelly in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Jen­nifer Con­nelly is sadly wasted, again. As in Ang Lee’s oth­er­wise under­rated Hulk, she’s rel­e­gated to second-billing below the com­puter effects. The great Kathy Bates fares even worse in a role any­one could have played. As for the leg­endary John Cleese’s cameo as a mad sci­en­tist, I assume the idea was to cast a slightly kooky per­son­al­ity with a British accent to project intel­li­gence to dumb Amer­i­can audi­ences. But the for­merly manic Cleese has mel­lowed out so much in his later years that they could have just cast any old Brit.

The orig­i­nal Day the Earth Stood Still was quite obvi­ously a Cold War para­ble, if a lit­tle mud­dled in its par­tic­u­lars. This ver­sion skirts the pol­i­tics of war, choos­ing instead to recast the basic premise as an eco-parable. Much like M. Night Shyamalan’s Hap­pen­ing (read The Dork Report review), New York’s Cen­tral Park is ground zero for an eco­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phe. Part of Klaatu’s mis­sion is to save sam­ples of the Earth’s bios­phere, which the Sec­re­tary of Defense (Bates) explic­itly equates to the Bib­li­cal tale of Noah’s Ark.

Wikipedia notes the film was a largely green pro­duc­tion, in which the crew recy­cled or donated props and cos­tumes, and uti­lized a cen­tral intranet to reduce paper waste. But within the story itself, for an alien con­cerned about clean­ing up the Earth, Klaatu is quite con­tent to ride back and forth from Man­hat­tan to New Jer­sey in a gas-guzzling SUV (the man­u­fac­turer of which no doubt pro­vided prod­uct placement).

Finally, some ques­tions: exactly how much of the world is dec­i­mated in the end? How does Klaatu expect human­ity to clean up the planet when he’s already destroyed most of the infra­struc­ture? Imag­ine all the home­less­ness, star­va­tion, chaos, riot­ing, and loot­ing that must be dealt with before any gov­ern­ment could even begin to think about ozone holes or car­bon col­lec­tion. Also, Klaatu’s species has the tech­nol­ogy to dis­in­te­grate all man­made mate­ri­als on an entire planet, but he totally dis­misses out of hand the idea of clean­ing up our pol­lu­tion for us, or at least lend­ing us the tech­nol­ogy? The orig­i­nal Klaatu had more faith in humanity.

Offi­cial movie site: www.dtessmovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

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The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951 movie poster

 

Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the few essen­tial sci­ence fic­tion movies that has lasted, over­com­ing dated spe­cial effects, act­ing styles, and the end of the Cold War (provider of sub­text for many a hor­ror story). In the com­pany of For­bid­den Planet (Shakespeare’s The Tem­pest in Space), The Blob (an inva­sive species con­sumes the pop­u­la­tion), and Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (small­town Amer­ica suc­cumbs to the ulti­mate con­for­mity), it con­tin­ues to res­onate decades later, even being reimag­ined in 2008 as an ecoparable.

Imme­di­ately strik­ing is the dis­so­nant score by Bernard Her­rmann, of Psy­cho fame. The evoca­tive piece over the open­ing cred­its sounds just like an out­take from Brian Eno’s ambi­ent album On Land, thirty years early.

Michael Rennie as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Stillevi­dently they have Bryl­creem in space

Wise shows us humanity’s first alien con­tact through the quaint fil­ter of period radio and tele­vi­sion; rest assured, “sci­en­tists and mil­i­tary men” are on the case. Klaatu (Michael Ren­nie), a suave cau­casian humanoid male alien, and his pet robot Gort (Lock Mar­tin) park their UFO on a base­ball field on The Mall in Wash­ing­ton D.C. His polite request for an audi­ence with the United Nations goes rebuffed, for dur­ing the height of the Cold War, not even a fly­ing saucer, an alien in a sil­ver jump­suit, and a giant robot is enough to con­vince the nations of the world to sit down and talk. Klaatu’s fly­ing saucer is sur­rounded by hilar­i­ously lax secu­rity, and he is briefly taken into cus­tody before hand­ily escap­ing into the D.C. suburbs.

Klaatu has learned mid-Atlantic accented Eng­lish from radio and tele­vi­sion broad­casts, and out­wardly appears per­fectly humanoid right down to his slicked-back hair (they evi­dently have Bryl­creem in space), so all he needs to blend in with the masses is to sim­ply steal someone’s dry clean­ing. He checks into a spare room, with some shots directly quot­ing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 clas­sic The Lodger. He befriends young Bobby (Billy Gray) with­out a hint of sus­pi­cion, dat­ing the film more than any­thing else.

Klaatu tries to get his mes­sage through to a paci­fist sci­en­tist, but he’s dis­cov­ered, shot, and dies. Gort, pro­grammed to acti­vate in such an event, threat­ens to exact an unspec­i­fied vio­lence upon human­ity. But Klaatu has already taught his inter­species ladyfriend Helen (Patri­cia Neal) the robot-mollifying fail-safe code­phrase “Klaatu barada nikto.” Gort ceases his hos­til­i­ties, and instead revives Klaatu using machin­ery on their ship. Klaatu claims his new lease on life is only for a lim­ited time, for true res­ur­rec­tion is only the domain of “the Almighty Spirit”. The remark­able fact that he believes in a God goes unre­marked upon; both he and the humans to whom he’s speak­ing sim­ply take it for granted they’re talk­ing about the same deity. This line stands out for a rea­son; the dia­logue was report­edly inserted at the request of the MPAA, who objected to Klaatu’s god­like pow­ers of res­ur­rec­tion. Fail­ing to reach the world’s lead­ers, he set­tles for the next-best thing: an assem­bled group of sci­en­tists (all, of course, white males). Mes­sage deliv­ered, he leaves Earth in a huff.

Lock Martin as Gort in the Day the Earth Stood StillKlaatu barada nikto! Don’t tase me, bro!

So, let’s recap: an oth­er­worldly vis­i­tor with a mes­sage of peace-or-else is exe­cuted, rises again, and ascends into the heav­ens. Do I have to spell it out?

But if Klaatu is anal­o­gous to Jesus, let’s take a closer look at his mes­sage. He claims Earth­lings’ war­like behav­ior is of no inter­est to the space­far­ing species of the uni­verse, as long as it’s con­tained to one planet. But the inter­stel­lar com­mu­nity is begin­ning to fear that Earth­lings are about to dis­cover inter­stel­lar travel, and they will not per­mit human­ity to bring their atomic weapons with them. Klaatu is the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of other soci­eties that have already passed through this phase, whom, unable to curb their vio­lent impulses on their own, came up with a solu­tion to police them­selves: a fleet of lethal robots pro­grammed to erad­i­cate any­one that vio­lates the truce. So they use weapons to deter the use of other weapons? What kind of mes­sage is that to a Cold War audi­ence liv­ing under the night­mare of Mutu­ally Ensured Destruc­tion? To the 21st Cen­tury viewer, the imme­di­ate worry is whether or not we could ever trust an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence with impar­tially keep­ing the peace. Indeed, whole sci­ence fic­tion fran­chises have been built upon that very theme, includ­ing 2001, Blade Run­ner, The Ter­mi­na­tor, The Matrix, and Bat­tlestar Galactica.

But per­haps I’m being too lit­eral. It’s a sim­ple movie, but is it a sim­ple anal­ogy? Is the army of Gorts a sym­bol for Earth’s nuclear arse­nal? No, because that’s exactly what Klaatu wants humans to put away. Accord­ing to The New York Times, pro­ducer Julian Blaustein “told the press [the film] was an argu­ment in favor of a ‘strong United Nations.’” But the U.N. is den­i­grated as petty and inef­fec­tive in the movie; they won’t deign to gather to merely lis­ten to Klaatu’s speech. The over­all mes­sage is very cyn­i­cal: even more advanced aliens aren’t able to curb their vio­lent impulses on their own. Klaatu is here to threaten, not save us. If we embark out into space bear­ing weapons, we’re toast.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is based on 1940 short story “Farewell to the Mas­ter” by Harry Bates. Wal­ter Tre­vis’ 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth (filmed in 1976 by Nicholas Roeg, star­ring David Bowie) shares some plot ele­ments (the alien Thomas New­ton too bears dia­monds as seed money), but veers off into another direc­tion alto­gether. New­ton has no inter­est in steer­ing humanity’s course. He’s here on a secret mis­sion to save his own peo­ple, but falls prey to his own all-too-human weaknesses.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Set Phasers to Awesome: Star Trek

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Star Trek movie poster

 

Like the 1966 Corvette a reck­less young James Tiberius Kirk com­man­deers in an early sequence, the new Star Trek is precision-crafted for speed, sex appeal, and total awe­some­ness. Kirk launches that beau­ti­ful machine off a cliff, but thank­fully direc­tor J.J. Abrams never does the same with the movie. Star Trek (the first in the fran­chise to go by the per­fectly terse name of the orig­i­nal TV series) joins the rar­i­fied ranks of the few other mod­ern block­busters that thrill and enter­tain (not to men­tion cost and earn mas­sive piles of money) yet have last­ing merit. Make room on the DVD shelf for a new entry in the canon, along­side Jaws, E.T.: The Extrater­res­trial, The Lord of the Rings tril­ogy, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Spider-Man 2.

Trek has a long tra­di­tion of uti­liz­ing the sci­ence fic­tion con­ceits of time travel and alter­nate dimen­sions to play­fully sub­vert its char­ac­ters and mythos. The orig­i­nal series intro­duced the Mir­ror Uni­verse, giv­ing the cast the chance to rein­ter­pret their goodly char­ac­ters in hairier, eviler alter egos. Two of the best movies brought the Enter­prise back in time, first to save the whales in the 1980s (in the light­hearted Star Trek IV: The Voy­age Home), and later to wit­ness Earth­lings’ first con­tact with an alien race in 2063 (in the under­rated Star Trek VIII: First Con­tact). Two of my per­sonal favorite Next Gen­er­a­tion episodes “Yesterday’s Enter­prise” and “All Good Things” tasked Cap­tain Picard with course-correcting an Enter­prise skip­ping through time, no mat­ter the sac­ri­fice. The fun in these kinds of sto­ries comes not just from their brain-teasing sci-fi con­cepts, but in enjoy­ing new twists on the estab­lished char­ac­ters fans love. But any real inno­va­tions were always only tem­po­rary, the sta­tus quo always quickly restored in time (so to speak) for the next episode.

Anton Yelchin, Chris Pine, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Zoe Saldana in Star Trekall hands on deck

Thus, the Star Trek fran­chise has man­aged to main­tain a sin­gle (albeit mas­sively com­pli­cated) time­line across six TV series, ten movies, and count­less nov­els and comic books. There’s even a niche mar­ket in the con­ti­nu­ity data itself, as evi­denced by pop­u­lar wikis like Mem­ory Alpha and ref­er­ence tomes such as Star Trek Chronol­ogy: The His­tory of the Future. Such cat­a­logs of the incred­i­bly com­plex future “his­tory” in which Trek is set are use­ful not only to obses­sive fans, but also to the writ­ers charged with cre­at­ing new sto­ries that don’t con­tra­dict what came before, at least too badly.

A cer­tain degree of renewal was already built right in to Star Trek. When any one premise ran out of ideas, an ensem­ble aged beyond plau­si­bil­ity, or rat­ings dipped, the pro­duc­ers could always start over with a new ship, a new space sta­tion, or in a new year. The most rad­i­cal depar­ture yet attempted was the ulti­mately dis­ap­point­ing final series, Enter­prise. The pre­quel, set years before Kirk would take the helm, got off to a great start with a Starfleet crew a world apart from any we had seen before. As many have pointed out over the years, Star Trek cre­ator Gene Rod­den­berry may have mod­eled Starfleet on the Navy, but the orig­i­nal 1960s series was basi­cally a West­ern set in space. The 1980s The Next Gen­er­a­tion recon­ceived Starfleet as kind of trans-species peace­keep­ing fleet, a kind of U.N. of The Milky Way. So, set between Earth­lings’ rough-and-tumble early space­far­ing years and the later ide­al­is­tic inter­galac­tic coöper­a­tion, Enter­prise fea­tured a bunch of cocky cow­boys brazenly tak­ing their val­ues out with them into space, base­ball caps firmly screwed on heads, and phasers defi­antly set to kill. The series seemed poised to be a some­what obvi­ous but fruit­ful metaphor for an arro­gant, George W. Bush-era United States forcibly spread­ing democ­racy where it wasn’t wel­come. But its qual­ity (both in writ­ing and in spe­cial effects bud­get) bot­tomed out in just a few episodes, and even the smoking-hot, well-endowed Vul­can T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) couldn’t keep the show on the air.

Zoe Saldana in Star TrekUhura mod­els the lat­est in 23rd Cen­tury Blue­tooth fashions

The entire Star Trek fran­chise seemed all but dead after Enter­prise’s can­cel­la­tion, not unlike the no-win sce­nario Spock devises as a test to tor­ture Starfleet cadets to see how they cope with fail­ure. A cher­ished part of Star Trek lore is that Kirk doesn’t believe in no-win sce­nar­ios, and thus cheated in order to win Spock’s unwinnable test. Para­mount evi­dently learned a les­son from Kirk’s lat­eral think­ing, for the first they they have given the OK to an irrev­er­ent new cre­ative team to per­ma­nently reboot Trek from top to bot­tom. Nearly all of Trek’s metic­u­lously main­tained con­ti­nu­ity (except­ing, iron­i­cally, the failed Enter­prise, set chrono­log­i­cally before any of the events of this movie) has now for­ever been rede­fined as belong­ing to an alter­nate time­line. At least, that is, until the next reboot. As the heavily-advertised appear­ance of Leonard Nimoy as the orig­i­nal “Spock Prime” attests, noth­ing nec­es­sar­ily pre­cludes the reap­pear­ance of any beloved orig­i­nal actors or other kinds of crossovers between time­lines (any­thing in pos­si­ble in sci­ence fic­tion). But Star Trek does mark a very clear end to Star Trek as we knew it.

After 40 years of unre­li­able qual­ity con­trol and dimin­ish­ing box office, such dras­tic mea­sures were arguably essen­tial to pre­serve Trek as a viable fran­chise. But I do sym­pa­thize with the grum­bling of long­time fans upset at scrap­ping every­thing and start­ing over. And this is not even to men­tion the many writ­ers, direc­tors, and actors that cre­ated the no-longer canon­i­cal sto­ries. All of which hasn’t dis­ap­peared from our real­ity, and will be enjoyed for­ever on DVD, but this film does ren­der pretty much every­thing that came before it as second-class Trek. I can’t help but won­der how all future spin­offs are now going to be han­dled on a prac­ti­cal level. For instance, if there are to be future comics or nov­els fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ters from The Next Gen­er­a­tion, are the phys­i­cal prod­ucts going to have to be labelled as tak­ing place in the now-depricated orig­i­nal fic­tional uni­verse? How does “Trek Clas­sic” and “Neu Trek” sound?

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star TrekSpock has had enough Kirk and can’t take it anymore

But back to the topic at hand: the totally awe­some new movie is packed with glossy art direc­tion, gen­uinely excit­ing spe­cial effects, fight scenes, chase sequences, and attrac­tive young actors young and attrac­tive enough to strut about on the big screen in their space scant­ies. Despite all this gloss, it some­how man­ages to not be totally stu­pid, which is more than This Dork Reporter can say about your typ­i­cal sum­mer movie (*cough* Trans­form­ers *cough*). How­ever, I can’t help but point out a few, for­give me, illog­i­cal plot ele­ments, espe­cially in the mad rush towards the end:

  • Why does Kirk bother fir­ing upon Nero’s ship as it’s being torn apart by a black hole? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: maybe Kirk feared Nero would time travel yet again to cre­ate mis­chief in yet another time­line (hey, there’s always the inevitable next reboot in a few years).
  • Starfleet is busy else­where in the galaxy, so we see the cadets mobi­lized into a strike force to con­front Nero. So why is the Acad­emy still full of stu­dents when Nero’s ship reaches Earth? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: maybe they were Fresh­men not qual­i­fied to do more than merely swab the decks.
  • It’s wildly implau­si­ble for young Spock to maroon Kirk on the same planet that Nero did Spock Prime. The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: nope, I got noth­ing. I mean, really, come on! (but still, the movie is awe­some, just go with it)
  • The hard­est plot point to swal­low is why Spock Prime does not accom­pany Kirk back to the Enter­prise. Would he really risk the fate of Earth because he thinks it’s more impor­tant that Kirk and his young self forge their des­tined friend­ship? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: yes.

But enough com­plain­ing. Did I men­tion the movie is TEH AWESOME? There’s not one bad per­for­mance to drag things down (a notable prob­lem with Watch­men — read The Dork Report review). Despite being tasked with recre­at­ing char­ac­ters beloved by fans for over 40 years, no one attempts an out­right imi­ta­tion or car­i­ca­ture. The most faith­ful is Zachary Quinto as Spock. Beyond his eerie phys­i­cal resem­blance to Nimoy (maybe not how he actu­ally looked in 1966, but how he might have), he has a fresh take that plays up the character’s inter­nal strug­gle between emo­tion and logic. Chris Pine art­fully embod­ies Kirk’s blend of right­eous nobil­ity and brash rule-busting atti­tude with­out aping William Shatner’s famously hammy style (for which we all, admit it, love him). Karl Urban nails Bones as a sea­sick pes­simist, and Zoe Sal­dana and John Cho bring wel­come sass and phys­i­cal action hero prowess to Uhura and Sulu, two char­ac­ters often left on the side­lines. Only Anton Yelchin and Simon Pegg come close to over­do­ing it. Pegg mugs and shouts, play­ing Scotty as much more of a mad Scots­man than James Doohan ever did, and Yelchin overex­ag­ger­ates Chekov’s accent for pure com­edy. But that’s not to say both per­for­mances aren’t hugely enter­tain­ing, just like every­thing else on display.

Simon Pegg in Star TrekPegg gives Scotty’s accent all she’s got, Captain!

Star Trek goes much much fur­ther with Spock’s half-human nature than any of the Trek I’ve seen. Spock was such a key ingre­di­ent that almost every ver­sion of Trek that fol­lowed was oblig­ated to include a sim­i­lar char­ac­ter: most obvi­ously the android Data (Brent Spiner) in The Next Gen­er­a­tion. We are reminded the Vul­can species is not nat­u­rally emo­tion­less, as many casual fans assume, but rather a deeply pas­sion­ate peo­ple that holds its war­like nature in check by ele­vat­ing logic to the level of reli­gion. A purely devout Vul­can would be about as dra­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing as a robot (but it must be said that even Spock’s father Sarek (Ben Cross), a high-ranking Vul­can elder, pri­vately admits to being moved by the irra­tional emo­tion of love). The aged Spock Prime is prac­ti­cally jovial, seem­ingly hav­ing come to terms with his dual­ity. It’s actu­ally rather heart­warm­ing for a long­time fan to see him at a place of peace with himself.

I have room for one more small com­plaint: there’s an over­re­liance on clichéd father issues as easy story short­cuts to define char­ac­ter, for which I blame J.J. Abrams. Both Kirk and Spock are torn between rebelling against and own­ing up to their respec­tive heroic, accom­plished fathers. Abrams also built his TV series Alias and Lost upon the same dra­matic crutch, in which seem­ingly every char­ac­ter is pri­mar­ily moti­vated by strained rela­tion­ships with absent and/or bad fathers (e.g. Syd­ney, Jack, Locke, Kate, Miles, etc…). One won­ders, sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, how many peo­ple in the world actu­ally do have such com­pli­cated rela­tion­ships with their dads. Maybe those that do are just more likely to make their careers writ­ing scripts for Hollywood.

None of the many Trek sequels, pre­quels, or spin­offs to date have ever reached the mythic sta­tus of the orig­i­nal series and its core dynamic duo Kirk and Spock. Star Trek makes a bold bid to reclaim what made the orig­i­nal such a phe­nom­e­non: it goes back to the orig­i­nal sce­nario and char­ac­ters, and thor­oughly remas­ters, rein­vig­o­rates, rein­vents, and gives them a swift kick in the ass. It restores the names Kirk and Spock to the realm of leg­ends and icons.

Offi­cial movie site: www.startrekmovie.com

Battlestar Galactica: Caprica

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Battlestar Galactica Caprica poster

 

UPDATE: Read our revised and expanded review of the Caprica pilot, writ­ten after the pilot aired on television.

The recently con­cluded series Bat­tlestar Galac­tica (2003–2009) was crit­i­cally acclaimed and much beloved by a rel­a­tively small group of fans and crit­ics that appre­ci­ated the sexy, brainy show’s bleak, pes­simistic view of human­ity. It will cer­tainly live for­ever as a clas­sic achieve­ment in tele­vi­sion, but the com­mon con­sen­sus is that it failed to reach the wide audi­ence it could have. Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer Ron Moore told Vari­ety “‘We had view­ers say that if they were able to trick their wives or girl­friends into watch­ing Galac­tica, they loved it. But with the name Bat­tlestar Galac­tica scream­ing sci­ence fic­tion,’ he adds, ‘there was just such a high hur­dle to get female view­ers to even try it.’” So comes Caprica, a pre­quel osten­si­bly engi­neered from the begin­ning for greater appeal.

The series proper will not air until early 2010, but in an orig­i­nal move, its unrated (read: blood ‘n’ boo­bies) movie-length pilot episode pre­miered day-and-date on DVD and dig­i­tal down­load. It pre­serves some of the sig­na­ture ver­nac­u­lar of its par­ent series: tech­nob­a­b­ble like “Cylon” (Cyber­netic Life­form Node), the trip-on-the-tongue “gods damn it,” the infa­mous euphemism “frak,” and even racial epi­thets like “dirt eater.” The char­ac­ter of Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos in Bat­tlestar Galac­tica) appears as a young boy. Some of the same core themes are still present, par­tic­u­larly reli­gious intol­er­ance and fam­i­lies cop­ing with cat­a­strophic dis­as­ter. But there are sig­nif­i­cantly wor­ri­some signs that indi­cate a fatal mis­cal­cu­la­tion on The SyFy Channel’s part (worse than their aston­ish­ingly stu­pid rechris­ten­ing from “Sci-Fi”): Caprica hinges on two men and three annoy­ing teens, rel­e­gat­ing its only two adult female char­ac­ters to the sidelines.

Eric Stoltz and Esai Morales in Battlestar Galactica CapricaCaprica, like Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, holds that there are no Sur­geon Gen­eral warn­ings in space

It may very well be the case that many women were dis­cour­aged from check­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica out, but it’s also true that the show fea­tured a bevy of sig­nif­i­cant, com­plex women: self-destructive fire­brand Star­buck (Katee Sack­hoff), pres­i­dent of all human­ity Laura Roslin (Mary McDon­nell), Dick Cheney-esque war crim­i­nal Cap­tain Cain (Michelle Forbes), and con­flicted Cylons Three (Lucy Law­less), Six (Tri­cia Helfer), and Eight (Grace Park). So far, at least, Caprica includes only two lead female roles, nei­ther of whom fig­ures strongly in the plot: Amanda Gray­stone (Paula Mal­com­son, from Dead­wood) and Sis­ter Clarice Wil­low (Polly Walker, from Rome). But maybe this makes a kind of sense. The core dynamic is clas­sic sto­ry­telling: indus­tri­al­ist Daniel Gray­stone (Eric Stoltz) and lawyer Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) become entan­gled in a plot, while com­ing from oppos­ing philo­soph­i­cal points of view. If one of them had been female, the viewer might nat­u­rally expect a roman­tic sub­plot. Caprica’s cre­ators may have avoided this kind of dis­trac­tion, but the down­side is that the pri­mary nar­ra­tive con­flict is between two men, and the only two female char­ac­ters are solely defined by their rela­tion­ships to their men and kids. Daniel and Amanda’s daugh­ter Zoe (Alessan­dra Tores­sani) is killed in a ter­ror­ist attack, but we never see the icy Amanda mourn as we do Daniel. Her char­ac­ter is sim­ply Daniel’s wife, noth­ing more. Sis­ter Wil­low, at least, is revealed by the end to be more than she seems. Here’s hop­ing we see Amanda and Sis­ter Wil­low sig­nif­i­cantly expanded in future episodes.

Another thing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica got right was to side­step alto­gether the trap of child char­ac­ters. It was an adult show, for intel­li­gent adults. Caprica obvi­ously also didn’t learn from a les­son from Jeri­cho (2006–2008), a gen­er­ally smart show whose weak­est char­ac­ters were a pair of teens that were thank­fully writ­ten out. Out of Caprica’s trio of incred­i­bly annoy­ing kids, at least two die but unfor­tu­nately come back.

Eric Stoltz, Paula Malcomson, and Esai Morales in Battlestar Galactica CapricaWait, there was a woman in Caprica? Let’s hope poor Paula Mal­com­son actu­ally gets some scenes in the full series

The first 10 min­utes pack in a huge down­load of infor­ma­tion, espe­cially for some­one not already versed in the fic­tional Galac­tica uni­verse. Cer­tain key points are reit­er­ated once things slow down later, but a new viewer tun­ing in cold might get the sense they were sup­posed to be versed in all this stuff already, instead of just get­ting teased with a bar­rage of info to be unpacked later. When a title card reads “58 years before The Fall,” Galac­tica fans will catch the ref­er­ence to the sneak attack by the Cylons that nearly erad­i­cates their human creators.

We then cut directly to the deca­dent V Club, imply­ing its late-Rome-like deca­dence to be one of the direct causes of the com­ing Fall. A fully immer­sive vir­tual real­ity sim­u­la­tion not unlike The Matrix, the V Club is full of teens danc­ing to dated techno, hot les­bians, sim­u­lated human sac­ri­fice, and a fight club. Its banal­ity betrays a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion not just on the part of Caprica’s teens, but also on the film­mak­ers. A rebel­lious gen­er­a­tion cre­ates a vir­tual world in which they can do absolutely any­thing they want, and all they can come up with is a sin­gle night­club that only spins techno from Earth’s 1990s? No gay boys want to make out? Nobody wants to fly? Nobody wants a body made of jade?

The tit­u­lar Caprica is the cap­i­tal of twelve plan­ets col­o­nized by human­ity. We only caught glimpses of its future on Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, so there is plenty of unex­plored ter­ri­tory for a new series to fill in. Its fash­ions resem­ble 1950s Amer­ica, per­haps meant to cap­i­tal­ize on the pop­u­lar­ity of the Show­time series Mad Men. We’re sup­posed to agree that Caprica is a cor­rupt, deca­dent soci­ety on the cusp of col­lapse. But how, exactly? They’re play­ing god(s) by delv­ing into dan­ger­ous tech­no­log­i­cal areas like robotic weapons and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, or at least a means of record­ing a human individual’s con­scious­ness into a com­puter. They’ve designed vir­tual real­ity sys­tems capa­ble of sim­u­lat­ing any desire. The soci­ety is racist to the core; Tau­rans (from the colony Tau­rus) are called “dirt eaters” and asso­ci­ated with orga­nized crime (although to be fair, the lat­ter actu­ally is true — they seem sim­i­lar to the immi­grant Sicil­ian mafia in 1920s Amer­ica). Like Michael Cor­leone in the God­fa­ther tril­ogy, Joseph is osten­si­bly an upstand­ing cit­i­zen forced to com­pro­mise with his her­itage. Unable to com­pletely extri­cate him­self from the mob, he tries to raise his son as a Capri­can, to the con­ster­na­tion of his grandmother.

Alessandra Toressani in Battlestar Galactica CapricaZoe, genius hacker, goes club­bing in The Matrix

This society’s most dan­ger­ous trait is its ingrained reli­gious intol­er­ance. The pop­u­la­tion is almost uni­formly poly­the­is­tic, and intol­er­ant of the minor­ity monothe­ists. Under­ground mil­i­tants have formed the Sol­diers of the One, a cult that believes in a com­bi­na­tion of monothe­ism and anti-science. Their rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sis­ter Wil­low manip­u­lates ter­ror­ist tot Ben (Avan Jogia) to stage a bombing.

The biggest addi­tion to the Bat­tlestar Galac­tica mythos is a deeper look into arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Like the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise, I appre­ci­ate Caprica’s empha­sis that devel­op­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is a sep­a­rate pur­suit than build­ing robots. Too many sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries seem to equate the two, includ­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica itself in its final episode. The Day the Earth Stood Still and For­bid­den Planet’s humanoid robots have minds of its own, but what about being robots makes them so, as opposed to immo­bile com­put­ers? Blade Runner’s repli­cants and A.I.‘s boy robots look human first, and it is never asked what exactly makes them sen­tient beings (unless the ques­tion is how we anthro­po­mor­phize things that out­wardly seem human). Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is almost always auto­mat­i­cally evil in movies such as Ter­mi­na­tor and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is rarely inher­ently inno­cent, as in A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. Caprica fea­tures two dis­turb­ing scenes of a human con­scious­ness wak­ing up trapped in a crude robot body. That’s called overeg­ging your pud­ding. Also creepy: the advances made by Zoe lead directly to Daniel’s clumsy war­rior robots becom­ing the effec­tive killing machines chris­tened Cylons.

Speak­ing of, how could a lumi­nary in the robot­ics busi­ness not know his own daugh­ter was a genius hacker? A par­tic­u­larly hard-to-swallow bit of tech­nob­a­b­ble is the repeated sta­tis­tic that the amount of data encoded in a human brain com­prises only 300 megabytes. Appar­ently work­ing on her own, Zoe comes up with the solu­tion to pre­serv­ing a human mind in a com­puter: sup­ple­ment that 300 MB of data with the dig­i­tal detri­tus that per­son has left behind: med­ical records, playlists, email, searches, etc. Her break­through allows Daniel to res­ur­rect Joseph’s late daugh­ter as well (although we don’t see how he obtained her 300 MB worth of brain mat­ter). The resul­tant dupli­cate quickly goes insane, so Zoe is some­how spe­cial, the only dig­i­tal human mind that doesn’t go mad.

Some awfully big events are revealed in the DVD edition’s deleted scenes: Adama learns early on that Zoe was involved in the bomb­ing, adding an extra dimen­sion to his inter­ac­tions with her father. Also, boy bomber Ben’s mind was also suc­cess­fully uploaded into the V Club by Sis­ter Wil­low, sug­gest­ing that Zoe might not be so unique after all, and that her sci­en­tic break­throughs may have been in part devel­oped by the Sol­diers of the One. Both of these strike me as great lay­ers of com­plex­ity that would have only added to the story.

Offi­cial movie site: www.scifi.com/caprica

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.